


Pushing All Your Buttons

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Also Canon-Compliant Poop Jokes, Exhibitionism, Hand Jobs, M/M, Tasteless Westward Expansion Jokes, Trapped In Elevator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-24 09:05:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16171967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: Ryan and Shane get stuck in an elevator at Buzzfeed HQ. There is tension. They relieve the tension.  That’s it, that’s the fic.





	Pushing All Your Buttons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drunkkenobi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drunkkenobi/gifts).



> For Catt, who requested banging it out in an elevator and subsequently got Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” stuck in my head for two weeks straight. Are we not all livin’ it up ‘til we hit the ground, in a way? 
> 
> It’s my firm belief that Ryan Bergara has secretly watched all fourteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

*

They should have taken the stairs.

They _would_ have taken the stairs, they _usually_ take the stairs, except someone was filming one of those “Unsuspecting Buzzfeed Staffers Try Weird Foods, Probably Bugs IDK” videos this morning in sound stage B and one of the participants wasn’t able to keep their weird food down through the morning.

They get to the stairwell, Ryan barging ahead, and then he stops so abruptly Shane has to clutch at the doorframe to avoid running into his back and knocking him down the flight of stairs headfirst. There’s an orange cone at the top, the only indication other than the smell that something’s not right.

“Newp,” Ryan says, pinching his nose. “Somebody yurked. Elevator it is.”

“Sometimes this is the only exercise I get in a day,” Shane protests, but he lets himself be led to the elevator. “This hot bod doesn’t maintain itself, Ryan. How am I supposed to stay in the excellent shape you see before you if I take the elevator?”

“What shape would that be?” Ryan asks, too preoccupied to crack a smile.

“I’m a very long, thin rectangle,” Shane says. “With a little belly, like where a volcano bulges out before it erupts. That’s a…that’s a shape.”

The meeting hadn’t gone as well as they’d wanted. The Unsolved Network’s been live for three months and this was their first quarter check-in. Shane can tell by the distracted look on Ryan’s face, by the slouch to his shoulders, that Ryan went into that meeting with specific numbers in mind and that they didn’t hit ‘em.

Nobody’s worried yet—nobody except Ryan, who exists on a different plane of invested than everybody else. The big guns upstairs don’t seem even a little concerned. The numbers are good, they’re just not slam-dunk good.

Shane watches in mild alarm as Ryan aggressively pushes the down arrow button multiple times, like it’ll make the elevator get there faster. The fifth floor is deserted, since almost everybody is at lunch. Shane can’t decide whether now’s the right time to say something, or whether he should wait until Ryan’s less hangry to embark on a clean-up operation.

Ryan stabs at the button again, and Shane decides it can wait until after lunch.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, the elevator door opens with a quiet ding. This building’s still pretty new, and the elevator has that lingering chemical fresh-paint smell.

Shane presses the button for the second floor, where their desks are, before Ryan can dislocate his finger jabbing at the panel.

They stand in silence as the elevator starts to descend. Ryan’s leaning back against the wall opposite Shane, eyes closed, arms crossed. Shane can see the tension in his back and shoulders and arms, how tightly he’s wound, how fast the wheels in his head are spinning.

Shane opens his mouth to say something reassuring, but before he gets the chance the elevator shudders and comes to a sudden stop. It’s so sudden that Ryan’s jolted out of his lean, thrown so off-balance that he almost falls over. Shane slams back against the wall of the elevator, the hand rail jabbing into his hip with a bruising _thwack_.

The harsh overheads of the elevator go dark, leaving only the red-tinged emergency lights.

“Fuuuuuuck,” Ryan says, slow and quiet, his face shadowed and pink from the poor lighting. Shane doesn’t disagree.

*

**Phase one: catastrophizing**

They wait in silence for a moment, willing the lights to come back on, waiting for the elevator to start moving again. Nothing happens.

“Well that’s not great,” Shane says. He prods tentatively at the button for the second floor, which is no longer lit up. More nothing.

He presses the emergency call button, and a ringing noise echoes through the elevator shaft somewhere below them. Below the button there’s a little indicator light, with a bit of text: _When flashing, help is on the way._

The light isn’t flashing.

“Sure,” Shane says, because of course it isn’t. “You know, I’m only just realizing that I don’t know how elevators work. It’s the kind of thing you don’t think about until suddenly you really, really wish you knew more about elevators.”

“I’ve read extensively about people who died in elevators,” Ryan says, which isn’t super-helpful. He’s already slid to the floor in a kind of crouch, knees to his chest, as if making himself very small will bring the power back on faster.

“Elevators have emergency brakes, and anti-shock pads at the bottom, and stuff,” Shane says, more firmly than someone who just admitted to knowing nothing about elevators has any right to do.  He can see where this is going. “People don’t die in elevators anymore.”

“Sometimes people die in elevators,” Ryan says, in the grim, toneless voice of authority born of many late-night Wikipedia spirals.

“Okay, well, we’re not going to die in _this_ elevator. In a few minutes the power will come back on.  I really don’t think we’re about to plummet to our deaths.”

Shane presses the emergency call button again, and watches as the indicator light remains solidly dark.

“Nobody thinks that, though, do they?” Ryan asks. “People who plummet to their deaths are usually surprised about it. Just in general.”

That is, Shane feels, a fair point, but he doesn’t say so.

“I give you my word that nobody’s dying in this elevator today,” he says instead. Ryan’s got his forehead tucked into his elbow and his elbow rested on his knee, coiled up tight. Shane knows that whatever’s going on in Ryan’s brain is a mirror image of his physicality: jumbled-up threads of worry, some more plausible than others, knotting together until they’ll be impossible to pick apart, until Ryan himself can’t sort out what’s real and what’s nonsense.

“We could run out of air, though,” Ryan says. “If we…if nobody knows we’re in here.”

He sounds calm enough, but Shane can practically smell the thin metallic undercurrent of barely-concealed panic. He’d know it on Ryan at a hundred paces by now.

“A shit-ton of lazy assholes work in this building, Ryan, and it’s a Thursday afternoon. I promise someone will report the elevator broken in no time, if they haven’t already.”

Shane pushes the call button once more for good measure, and then he slides his body down the smooth, cool wall of the elevator to crouch next to Ryan—not touching, but nearly. He tries not to think about how dirty the floor probably is.

“I pinky-swear, on my honor as a gentleman and a scholar, that this will be fine,” Shane says, offering out his hand, pinky outstretched. “Pinky-swears are inviolable, and the laws of nature and physics must respect them. God himself would not defy a pinky-swear.”

Ryan pulls his head out of his elbow long enough that Shane can see the crook of a tiny smile. He reaches his hand out to lace his pinky with Shane’s.

“Okay,” he agrees, shaking their hands like a handshake, connected at the pinkies. Shane can just make him out in the poor lighting, can barely perceive the lessening of tension in his shoulders and the unfurling of his neck into an upright seated position. Not unlike Liam Neeson, Shane’s got a particular set of skills, acquired over a long ghost-hunting career. Talking Ryan off the precipitous edge of his own anxious mind is one of them.

“But I don’t think a few days of research about Ben Franklin’s wrinkly old boners makes you a scholar,” Ryan adds, which is how Shane knows for sure he’s been successful.

“You’re not wrong, but I won’t be lectured on scholarship standards by the man who thinks Websleuths is a primary source,” Shane says. “And for that matter, I’m also not a gentleman.”

*

**Phase two: problem-solving**

Ryan’s a doer, once you can get his brain to chill the fuck out long enough to concentrate on solutions. He doesn’t like to sit around and wait for help to find him, even though Shane knows that’s how this story will inevitably end.

Ryan’s not someone who knows how to do nothing, when he could be doing _something_. Anything.

“My phone doesn’t have reception in here, the walls are too thick,” Ryan says, after a good ten minutes of fiddling around with his. “You?”

“Mine died in the meeting,” Shane says, prodding the buttons of his own unresponsive phone.

“Okay, well, we’re going to have to get ourselves out of here, then,” Ryan says decisively. Shane’s about to agree on reflex just because he likes the newly-upbeat tone in Ryan’s voice and wants to encourage it, but then he stops and actually thinks about what Ryan’s just said.

“Sure, oka—wait, what?”

“Give me a boost,” Ryan says. He nudges his chin up toward the ceiling of the elevator.

“A—Ryan, I’m not going to _give you a boost_.”

“Well, I’m not going to give _you_ a boost. I could probably lift you up there no problem, but you’d never be able to haul yourself up with those noodle arms. You give me a boost, and then I’ll pull myself up, and then I’ll pull you up behind me.”

Shane eyes Ryan’s biceps in wary appreciation. The thing is, Ryan probably _could_ pull himself out of the elevator, and pull Shane out too. Shane’s stomach turns an excited little somersault imagining the sheer cinematic drama of it. It’s almost enough to make him entertain the possibility, but then reason intervenes again.

“This isn’t Mission Impossible, man. You’re not Tommy Cruise. We’re not going to climb up the elevator shaft to safety.”

“Why not, though?”

“For starters, if the power came back on and the elevator went up it would crush us and then we actually would die. You could fall. More likely still, _I_ could fall, what with the noodle arms.”

Ryan frowns, as if this is a wrinkle he hasn’t considered. He looks so deflated that Shane feels awful for puncturing his enthusiasm, even though he knows it’s a terrible idea.

“Okay, I’ll—I’ll try to give you a boost, but nobody’s climbing out of anything. At most you can try to get one of the ceiling panels off and we’ll do some yelling.”

Ryan brightens at this. Maybe he’s just happy for something to do with himself, or maybe he’s secretly always wanted to try to break out of an elevator. Honestly, there’s a small part of Shane that’s into it too—the part that’s watched a thousand dramatic elevator escape action scenes in movies and always wondered what it would be like in real life.

The answer, it turns out, is: embarrassing.

Shane kneels down and makes a cup of his hands for Ryan to fit his foot into. He tries to lift Ryan that way, a sort of cheerleader-style lift, but he’s not super strong and Ryan’s not very good at keeping his body stiff enough to go vertical. Instead he falls over, again and again, the momentum from Shane’s boosts making him bang into the walls of the elevator.

After Ryan lands on the floor with a particularly alarming thud, the whole elevator wobbling from the impact, Shane shuts that approach down.

“Okay, try—get on my shoulders.”

“I…yeah, okay,” Ryan says, looking at Shane speculatively.

Shane kneels down near the wall. There’s nothing to do but keep his head down while Ryan sort of positions his legs around Shane’s head, clutching at the slippery wall with one hand and Shane’s shoulder with the other.

It’s somehow even _less_ smooth. The heat of Ryan’s legs around him, the clutch of his thighs around Shane’s head, is too distracting. Once Ryan’s in position, Shane tries to stand, grasping at Ryan’s calves for counterbalance.

Six and a half feet in the air is, after all, very high in the air.

Shane’s about halfway up to standing when Ryan says, “Ahaha, nope,” and starts to slide off. Shane has to spin quickly to trap Ryan’s body between himself and the wall of the elevator so Ryan doesn’t fall all the way down at once. Ryan lets out a quiet _oof_ and slides pathetically downwards until he’s on the floor.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Shane says at last. “I’m too tall and you’re too heavy.  I can do this with a girl when I’m in a pool, but I don’t think I can do it with you out of one.”

“It’s all muscle,” Ryan mutters, but he doesn’t argue. “One more time. Give me a piggyback ride and then I’m going to try to—” he mimes climbing, “—climb up you.”

“Sounds great,” Shane says drily, but he bends over all the same to let Ryan hop on his back like an overlarge, muscley backpack.

“We have very glamorous jobs,” Ryan says with a grunt as Shane stands to his full height. Ryan tries to inch up vertically, but he’s got his arms around Shane’s neck in a way that’s fine until it’s very suddenly not fine.

“Ryan, I can’t breathe—” he chokes out. Ryan loosens his grip, but that’s enough to propel him backwards, and soon the both of them are toppling over like a felled tree with a squirrel in it.

They end up in a heap on the floor of the elevator. Ryan starts to laugh hysterically from his position trapped half-under Shane, a full-body-shaking laugh that makes Shane’s whole body move with it too. Ryan sprawls his arms and legs out like a starfish. Shane knows he should un-drape himself from over Ryan, should pull back before it gets weird, but instead he lets his ear rest on Ryan’s stomach and feels the vibrations as Ryan’s laughter dies into normal breathing.

“You’re like that scene in Jurassic Park with the sick triceratops,” Ryan says. Shane’s head goes up and down as the air is forced out of Ryan’s lungs. He can smell the laundry detergent Ryan uses, fresh and pine-tinged, and just the barest hit of sweat under that. “Gonna figure out what’s wrong with me, just from listening to me breathing?”

“My diagnosis is that you’re a lunatic and you should be sedated immediately,” Shane says. He feels the strange impulse to turn his head down, to nuzzle into Ryan’s belly. He indulges for a second, pushing his forehead down into that soft clean smell, and then he pulls himself up and off. “Let’s make a pact to never tell anybody about any of this.”

“Not exactly Die Hard,” Ryan agrees. “Might as well admit it: if our lives were a movie it’d be a buddy comedy and not an action flick.”

“A real blow to the ol’ ego.”

Shane scooches to get his back against the wall again, legs stretched out in front of him. It’s starting to get warm in the elevator, the absence of A/C starting to become noticeable. The chemical smell of the elevator is fading, to be replaced by human smells: clean clothes and sweaty skin and the product Ryan uses in his hair. It’s a little more bearable, somehow. Almost pleasant.

*

**Phase three: irritation**

Shane can tell, by the look on Ryan’s face, by the twitchy metallic thump of his fingers against the elevator wall, that he’s going to pick a fight just for something to _do_.

Shane doesn’t mind being alone with his thoughts for extended periods of time, but when Ryan doesn’t have external stimuli to distract him he falls quickly into anxious over-thinking. In here, absent anything to do or watch or listen to, he starts to pluck around for any form of entertainment he can find.

If Shane had been thinking clearly he’d have come up with a stupid game for them to play, something to keep Ryan focused. But he’s too narrowed-in on his own concerns: on the tight quarters, and the uncomfortable closeness, and the appealing smell of Ryan’s laundry detergent and the softness of his t-shirt against Shane’s cheek.

“I think we’re gonna go all-in on the spirit box next season,” Ryan says. “It’s the only evidence we get sometimes, and—”

Yep, there it is. Ryan only brings up the spirit box when he’s itching for an argument. It’s the easiest-ever bait, and Shane rises to it every time.

“Evidence? Ryan, it’s a radio. It picks up _radio stations_. I’m not doing more of that fucking box, I outright refuse.”

“Even you have to admit that the spaghetti and apple tater thing was great.”

“Yeah, because it was making _fun_ of the spirit box. You get that, right? You get that I and the viewers and the radio deejays of the Southeast Ohio region were all making fun of you, yes?”

“We need more stuff to do,” Ryan says stubbornly. “I don’t want the show to be all gimmicks, but like—sometimes nothing happens at all and it’s impossible to edit that. It’s just us in terrible lighting, you with ugly facial hair looking like a vampire that hasn’t slept or seen the sun in actual months.”

Shane thinks that’s pretty fucking rich coming from Ryan, who sleeps _maybe_ five hours a night and has bags under his eyes big enough that they could pack all their shooting gear in there and have room left over for fruit snacks and animal crackers and La Croix.

“Oh, and whose fault is that, Ryan? Me not getting any sleep when we go on location? It couldn’t be because you make screeching noises in the middle of the night every time the floor creaks, could it? Look back at a video of me a couple of years ago, before we started doing this show. I was fresh-faced and dewy and you’ve ruined me.”

“Excuse me for not wanting to get murked by a ghost in my sleep,” Ryan shoots back.

“Maybe if you saved some of that fear for the actual episodes once in a while they wouldn’t be so boring,” Shane says. He spent the entire last Supernatural season trying to goad or trick Ryan into getting scared for the cameras, but no dice. “These days you’re the Brave Little Toaster until the exact _second_ I close my eyes, at which point you plaster yourself to my side like a terrified, sweaty lamprey and whimper for literal hours.”

“You know my position on this, dude. I’m not going to lie about what I’m seeing or feeling just to make better TV.”

“Fine, that’s perfectly defensible. I’m not going to listen to the spirit box for one second longer than I have to just to get good TV either. If you don’t like it you can shove the spirit box right up your ass and find another cohost.”

Ryan just snorts. Shane closes his eyes, but he can still hear the steady tap-tap of Ryan’s fingertips against the elevator wall.

“And if you don’t cut that out I’m going to come over there and snap your fingers off,” Shane adds.

Ryan doesn’t stop. Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap.

“I don’t _plaster myself_ ,” Ryan says, curt.

*

**Phase four: slap-happy**

Ryan’s sitting there playing Solitaire on his phone.  It’s been maybe half an hour since the elevator stopped, maybe forty minutes. Shane’s starting to get a little concerned, only because he’d expected to have heard something from somebody by now.

“Oh no,” Ryan says, putting down his phone. He starts to giggle.

“What?”

“What if—what happens when—”

Shane waits patiently as Ryan dissolves into helpless peals of laughter. Ryan laughs and laughs, his back shaking against the wall of the elevator and making a thumping sound. Finally he’s under control enough to say what’s on his mind.

“What happens when one of us has to pee? Or—or—take a shit?”

He’s off again, cackling into his arm, other hand clasped to his chest like his heart’s going to give out from laughing so hard. Under the red of the emergency lights his eyes are pink-tinged and shiny, wet with tears of mirth.

It’s kind of a miracle, Shane thinks, watching Ryan laugh. His whole body opens up with it, self-consciousness forgotten, anxiety abandoned. He becomes this beautiful, toothy, unfurled banner of a person you can’t help but stare at.

Shane’s never seen anybody laugh like that, so it transforms their whole face and self from something normal to something remarkable. It’s so infectious that he can’t not laugh as well, when Ryan gets going properly.

Shane snickers. “I mean…when you gotta go, you gotta go. I guess I turn my back and hum the 1812 Overture while you do your thing. And then you, like, climb back on my shoulders and hide it on top of the elevator.

“Oh my God,” Ryan wheezes. “Can you imagine? People smelling poo in the elevator for weeks, for months, and—”

“And the whole time it’s your shit up there, _lurking_ —”

“Haunting the elevator, in a way,” Ryan says, “Buzzfeed Solved,” and that’s what gets Shane going properly. Then they’re both howling with laughter until Shane’s got tears in his eyes, too, and he’s slumped over against the floor.

“The Mysterious Case of the Malodorous Mechanism,” he hisses, when he can talk.

“The Hair-Raising Tale of the Rank Rise,” Ryan adds, collapsing into giggles again.

“The—the—the—" Shane splutters, laughing too hard again to come up with another.

It’s not even that it’s _that_ funny, although the image of Ryan clambering up Shane’s back to hide his poop in the elevator shaft is undeniably hilarious. It’s just that Shane’s starting to get lightheaded from having blown past lunchtime, and it’s very warm in the elevator now, and he can smell Ryan’s body wash. The weird lighting in here is starting to feel like _mood lighting_ , that’s how far around the bend Shane has gone, and all he can do is laugh at the absurdity of everything.

“ _Spoopy_ ,” Ryan whispers, and it sets them off again.

*

**Phase five: thirst**

In the pure, literal sense of the word, Shane is very thirsty. He’s got a bottle of water in his bag, but Ryan’s question about what happens if they have to pee before they’re rescued has stuck with him and he’s wary to crack into it.

And in the less literal and more colloquial sense, it’s extremely hot in the elevator. It’s so hot that Ryan groans and, in one sudden movement, peels off his shirt to reveal an awful lot of sweat-sheened, tanned skin. Shane doesn’t even have a chance to prepare for it; suddenly Ryan is just…sitting there across from him, shirtless, one leg spread out wide on the floor and the other tucked up close.

“What—I—what?” Shane asks, which is exactly how cool and together he’s always imagined he would be in situations like this.

“It’s hotter than Satan’s asshole in here, man,” Ryan says. “Aren’t you sweltering?”

“Yeeeees,” Shane says slowly, “but I wasn’t about to subject you to my weird rectangle-with-a-volcano-bulge body with no warning.”

Ryan shrugs. “I don’t care, dude, do whatever. Also, that’s your new nickname. Shane ‘Volcano Bulge’ Madej.”

Shane’s genuinely annoyed about all of this. He doesn’t really want to take his shirt off, as warm as he is, but now that Ryan has it’s almost worse if Shane _doesn’t_. He’s got to take his shirt off too, or be the guy sitting there fully-clothed and staring at the glossy torso before him, and that’s creepsville.

At no point does it occur to him to simply not look.

Shane unbuttons his shirt very carefully, as if Ryan might melt like a witch at the sight of his chest, but Ryan just watches him take his shirt off through half-closed eyes.

“It’s not so weird,” Ryan says, with the critical eye of someone who must look at his own body all the time, at the bodies of other dudes at the gym all the time. Almost clinical, looking for weaknesses, evaluating strengths. “You look pretty good. A guy doesn’t need to be big to look good.”

This is news to Shane, who always assumed—from the way Ryan goes on about muscled actors—that Ryan _did_ think a guy needed to be big to look good. He’s not used to being appraised in this way, and he isn’t sure if he’s uncomfortable or if he likes it. Maybe both.

“Well, we can’t all be carved from marble as if by the gods, can we?” Shane asks, nodding his head at Ryan’s chest, at his arms. It’s entirely stupid, really, how good Ryan looks right now, in the foreign glinting light of the darkened elevator.  

Shane can’t figure out what’s wrong with him, all of a sudden. Low blood sugar, maybe. The heat, perhaps. The strangeness of the situation, of being trapped in this familiar place rendered unfamiliar by circumstance.

Ryan has been made strange by it too. Their arguments are well-trodden, their jokes are the same, but in this elevator, with nothing but time and each other to bounce off of, he looks entirely different.

Shane takes Ryan in, his eyes closed, head tipped back against the elevator wall. His Adam’s apple stands out against the smooth planes of his neck, and Shane realizes to his dismay that he wants to make a topographical map of those ridges and valleys with his mouth.

He wants to tuck his nose into Ryan’s shoulder and smell that clean detergent smell again, and the cool spice of his deodorant.

 _Perhaps this is what having a nervous breakdown feels like_ , Shane thinks. If so, it is very painful and terrible.

Then he briefly considers the possibility that the elevator did crash after all, that it sent them rocketing to the earth and now he’s trapped in some kind of sex purgatory with Ryan for all of eternity.

“Sorry, what kind of purgatory?” Ryan asks, squinting open his eyes.

Shit. Shit. This whole elevator’s a pressure cooker right now, just heat and moisture and air closing in around him. Usually Shane’s good under pressure but right now he’s cracking, accidentally speaking all his most private thoughts out loud.

“Nothing,” Shane says. His voice comes out high-pitched and crackly like it’s been put though a filter, but if Ryan notices he doesn’t say anything.

Ryan just starts to tap again, on the wall of the elevator, in a rhythmic pattern Shane can’t quite figure out. If it’s a song he doesn’t recognize it; it might just be something playing on loop in Ryan’s head.

“Oh my God, stop,” Shane says after a long moment. How can someone so attractive also be so obnoxious?

He’s annoyed at Ryan’s noises, and Ryan’s very firm pectoral muscles, and the cut at his hipbones where normal humans have fat and Ryan has little divots that Shane wants to slot his fingers into. He’s annoyed at Ryan’s anxiety for forcing Shane to manage it, and at the spirit box for existing, and at the smallness of this elevator. No corporate elevator has any business being this small.

He’s annoyed at the power for going out, and at Buzzfeed for not ponying up for a backup generator, and at whoever monitors and fixes the elevator for taking the world’s longest lunch break.

Most of all, Shane’s annoyed at himself for losing the plot over a nice smile and visible abdominals, like a fucking teenager.

“I said cut it out,” he repeats when Ryan keeps tapping away.

“Dude, _make me_ ,” Ryan says, sounding as irritated as Shane feels.

And then something in Shane snaps: a very tightly-corded rope of control that’s been holding him back from something, perhaps for much longer than today. He doesn’t realize he’s at the end of that rope until its last fraying edges pop apart.

He’s an even-keeled dude by all accounts, but everybody’s got a breaking point.

Before Shane’s brain even acknowledges that his body has moved, he’s kneeling in front of Ryan, grasping for his wrist, holding it tight against Ryan’s bare chest to stop the tapping. Ryan’s hand flexes under the circle of Shane’s fingers, testing the strength of the hold.

Ryan doesn’t pull his arm away, even though Shane knows he could. He just looks up at Shane with wide, surprised eyes, and he doesn’t say a word.

Shane’s not sure whether he’s going to yell at Ryan or kiss him. Then Ryan’s gaze flicks, instantaneously but unmistakably, to Shane’s mouth. It makes up Shane’s mind for him.

Shane leans down and kisses Ryan, hard enough to be punishing, hard like his grip on Ryan’s wrist. Hard enough that it feels like an answer to _make me_. Ryan’s frozen under him, too shocked to return the kiss, and Shane doesn’t linger. He swipes his tongue across the seam of Ryan’s lips so they fall open by instinct, deepens the kiss to make sure Ryan _feels it_ , and then pulls away.

“I said cut it the fuck out,” Shane says, and he drops Ryan’s wrist and moves back to his wall of the elevator.

“Um,” Ryan says, licking his lips. He looks down at his hand, like he’s thinking about tapping against the elevator again, and then he doesn’t.

*****

**Phase six: maudlin introspection**

“What do you think is wrong with it?” Ryan asks, out of nowhere.

There’s a lot that _it_ could be. Shane takes a shot in the dark.

“With the elevator? I think the power’s out,” Shane says. “Maybe a fuse blew. I don’t really know how fuses work either, so don’t ask.”

“No. With…with the new network. With BUN.”

Shane can tell that this has been eating at Ryan since the morning’s meeting, that it hasn’t been too far from the front of his mind even in the ensuing chaos.

He sighs. This is a conversation he’d prefer to have later, after a nice lunch and a couple of beers, and not particularly one he would have chosen for the middle of an already extremely tense situation. But Ryan’s jaw is set, his eyes fixed on Shane’s, and it’s that familiar dog-with-a-bone look there’s no point ignoring.

If Shane tries to get out of talking about this, they’re going to talk about the _other_ thing. That’s what that look says.

“Nothing’s wrong with it, man. These things take time, you know that. True Crime’s slower anyway, it’ll pick up for Supernatural.”

“I think we fucked up the unveiling somehow. Maybe we should have led stronger, put out Ruining History at the same time.”

“You know it won’t be ready for a while,” Shane says. They’ve argued about this before, about whether it’s better to flood with content or use the other shows to fill in the gaps between Unsolved seasons. “The strategy’s working, Sports Conspiracies has been trending for the last four eps in a row.”

He can barely make out Ryan’s shrug, it’s so tiny.

“The subreddit’s dying too,” Ryan says. “Fewer comments every week, and way more people complaining that it’s not the same any more. Whatever that means.”

“It’s _not_ the same,” Shane points out. If they have to get into it, they might as well get all the way into it. “It’s more professional now. We’ve got a whole team, it’s a big thing the way it never used to be. I think people are just reacting to that. Sometimes I wonder if there’s…if people watch for _us_ , and now there’s less us.”

He doesn’t mean anything particular by that, anything loaded, but he can tell Ryan doesn’t like it all the same.

“Maybe there’s too much Hot Daga,” Ryan says, narrowing his eyes. “Maybe the Daga’s jumped the shark. I’m not sure it’s…as inside jokes go it’s kind of run itself into the ground.”

Shane can’t tell if Ryan’s joking or not, or if he’s just striking out at random to nudge the conversation out of territory he finds uncomfortable.

“People love the Daga,” Shane protests. “It’s critically-acclaimed. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius.”

However, he knows that his cause isn’t helped by the meeting they just had, where one of Buzzfeed’s analytics people had pointed out that forty percent of viewers close the videos when the Daga starts. He knows Ryan’s thinking about that, too, and it’s hurtful in a way Shane wasn’t expecting and can’t articulate.

He also doesn’t know how to explain that the Hot Daga’s been _for Ryan_ this whole time: a dumb, kind of messed-up gift that Ryan didn’t ask for but that Shane meticulously puts together every week anyway. A bit that’s maybe gone on too long now, but one Shane doesn’t want to give up because watching Ryan perform his exasperation for it gives him too much joy. Watching him break on camera, unable to contain actual laughter, is even better.

Shane always assumed that Ryan knew that. He thought it was an unspoken understanding between them that Shane spends hours on his stupid animated hot dog story every week as a thank you for all the time Ryan spends researching and writing Unsolved. Because Shane wants one piece of this to be _from_ _him_.

Ryan sighs.

“I think it’s time we talked seriously about phasing it out.”

“It’s the one thing that I—that’s…” Shane trails off. “I know you’re frustrated, but Unsolved is 60% yours and 30% ours and 10% mine, and everybody knows it. It sucks that you’ve decided to blame my tiny percentage for a rocky transition when it’s the one bit that’s _exactly_ the same.”

They’ve joked before about ending the Hot Daga, but they’ve never talked seriously about it. Shane genuinely thought, this whole time, that Ryan liked it at least a little bit. That he could perceive the affection with which it was written.

Shane’s starting to wonder about that affection now, to peel back the layers of it to get a peek at whatever’s underneath.

“Maybe we’ve outgrown it,” Ryan says. “It’s kind of silly.”

“The silly is the point! People like the looseness of the show, dude. They like our banter. They like our—our chemistry, stop making that fucking face, you know it’s true. You can endlessly professionalize this all you want, but it’ll kill it.”

Ryan rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck, like he’s a prize-fighter easing his body into a fight, getting ready for blows.

“I want to make something that’s good in its own right. Something I’m proud of. I don’t want to make a show that people only like because they’re imagining us fucking, or—or whatever.”

It comes out of left field for Shane, and it hurts for more reasons than he’s comfortable with. First and foremost, because it implies the Hot Daga is something Ryan _isn’t_ proud of. Second because it suggests that Ryan resents the degree to which Shane has become inexorably a part of the show, how essential their chemistry has become to its success.

And third because it strikes Shane as a very low blow, to say that to him when Shane’s just kissed him.  

“That’s really _not_ what I meant by chemistry, Ryan. Jesus Christ. Fucking…what a shitty thing to say.”

If they were having this fight at their desks, or on their set, this is the point where one of them would stalk off to lick his wounds. They’d cool down, have lunch, and come back together with all forgiven. They’d probably pretend none of it ever happened, rather than actually addressing anything.

That’s not an option, trapped here as they are.

Shane wants to put his shirt back on, but Ryan hasn’t made a move to. It feels like an admission of something, if he does that, and so Shane stubbornly leaves it off even though he feels extraordinarily exposed without it.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ryan says, worrying at his thumbnail with his teeth. It’s hard to tell in the semi-dark, but he looks genuinely upset. “I just mean…I don’t want the show to be popular because people are into me, or you, or both of us. I want it to stand on its own merits.”

Shane gets that. Sometimes the Instagram comments are too much. Sometimes he thinks, in the middle of a meet and greet, uncomfortably hovering his arm around the shoulder of another sixteen-year-old stranger, that it’s way, _way_ too much.

“I’m just not sure you get to build the show on shrieking at air and then decide all of a sudden that you want to be taken seriously,” he says. “You can’t blame viewers for being confused about that.

“Fair,” Ryan says, on the exhale. “But the other thing is—I’m afraid to make the show too reliant on you, I guess. In case you, when you decide you’re done, I don’t want—”

“But I’m not going anywhere,” Shane says. “I’m right here.”

“Yeah, well, I think neither of us is going anywhere ever again,” Ryan says. He sounds tired. “And I really didn’t mean it like that.”

*

**Phase seven: contagious sexual insanity**

Shane’s lying down on the floor of the elevator, flat on his back, using his shirt as a barrier between his bare back and the floor. It’s so hot that he’s melted there, basically he has become a useless puddle of a human, with the added bonus that he doesn’t have to see Ryan’s face from here if he doesn’t want to.

Things are, in a word, _tense_.

“Okay, but also, you can’t just _do_ that,” Ryan says out of the blue, like he’s picking up a thread left hanging. Probably in his head, he is. It’s as if he’s been working himself up to it, rehearsing variations in his head until he’s forgotten it wasn’t a real two-sided conversation.

“Pardon?” Shane asks, from his position on the floor.

“You can’t just angry-kiss somebody in an elevator where they work with no warning,” Ryan says. “This isn’t Grey’s Anatomy.”

“Big Grey’s Anatomy fan, are we?”

“Shut up, a lot of people watched the first two seasons, and my mom really—okay, that’s not the point. The point is that you cannot.”

“Well, I did,” Shane says grumpily. He’s still not exactly sure what possessed him to do that, but he did it all the same, and neither he nor Ryan is going to forget that it happened in a hurry. “In fairness, you shouldn’t provoke people in elevators either.”

“I didn’t provoke you into _that_ ,” Ryan says.

“Oh, you provoked. You might not have known what would happen, but you knew perfectly well that _something_ would.”

“I thought you might hit me,” Ryan admits. “I’ve wanted to get in a fist-fight in an elevator ever since that Captain America movie where he takes all those dudes out. I wasn’t expecting you to go full Fifty Shades instead.”

“You’ve got the weirdest fucking taste,” Shane says. “And a lot of elevator pop culture references stored in there, apparently. Never mind how unbelievably stupid we would look trying to brawl in an elevator.”

“So then why the, um, kissing?” Shane can hear the hesitancy in Ryan’s voice, like he’s afraid to ask it but he’s too curious not to. Swear to god, it’s got to be a hundred and ten degrees in this elevator. Shane can feel his _elbows_ sweating.

“Dunno. It seemed like the thing to do. Dramatic.”

The real answer is that Shane had _wanted_ _to_ , and that he’d been possessed by the sudden need to find out what would happen. At first it seemed like disaster is what would happen, but something in Shane’s gut, where his instinct lives, is suggesting that’s not necessarily so. Something in him that knows Ryan inside and out is tugging at him to pay attention.

“Well,” Ryan says, exhaling and scuffling his shoes on the floor. “I guess it’s really warm in here. Sometimes people do weird shit when they’re overheated. I read somewhere that cities have more murders when the summers get really hot.”

“That’s true,” Shane agrees. “And I am prone to overheating.” He hadn’t expected Ryan to be brought around to his side of things so quickly. It’s satisfying to feel like they’re on the same team again, coming up with some plausible rationalizations and murder factoids to justify this insanity.

“And if you think about it we’re sort of in a survival situation here,” Ryan continues. “It’s all very—fraught. We’re trapped in here, we could _die_ in here, and that’s sort of—”

Okay, that’s a little much. Shane very much doubts they’re going to die in this elevator, although he’s not quite as sure as he was an hour ago. Still, he would like to hear how Ryan’s going to finish that sentence.

“Sort of…?”

“Sort of sexy. In a weird way. In a, like, what if it’s our last chance kind of way.”

Shane can hear Ryan’s breathing, heightened and too-fast. It sounds like Ryan’s breathing right in his ear, that’s how attuned to it he is, even though Ryan’s a few feet away.

Shane doesn’t know if Ryan means our last chance as in, your last chance and also my last chance, or if he really means _our_ last chance. They contain subtly different nuances, and it’s absolutely critical to Shane that he figure out which one Ryan intends.

“Mmm,” Shane says.

“And the lights are very…very dim.”

Shane gets the uncanny sense that Ryan has shifted from providing excuses for Shane to providing excuses for _Ryan_. He’s just not sure if Ryan’s noticed yet.

“And it’s sort of interesting, knowing we’re at work. Knowing that all our coworkers are, like, _right there_ ,” Ryan says.

It is, indeed, interesting. That angle hasn’t occurred to Shane at all, and it intrigues him that it so very quickly occurred to Ryan. It’s surreal to be lying here on the floor of this elevator, listening to Ryan talk himself into something. Shane’s dick is officially paying close attention to this conversation.

“Yeah?” Shane asks, lifting himself up on his elbows, suddenly desperate to see Ryan’s face.

Ryan’s got his hand in his lap, grinding his palm against himself through his jeans. His eyes are fixed to the corner of the elevator where the security camera lives, indicator light dark for now, and his shoulders are rising and falling with his heavy breaths.

Ryan’s capacity for swift personal growth is, Shane thinks, truly remarkable.

Shane plays to a hunch. “Be careful, Ry,” he says. “The power could come on any minute. Wouldn’t want coworkers to find you like this, would you? That’s how a person gets a reputation.”

Ryan’s eyes dart back to Shane’s. He groans, the sound echoes and reverberates off the walls, and Shane realizes with sudden horrified clarity that he’ll never be able to stand in this elevator again without getting a boner. In a way it truly _is_ a haunted elevator; it’s haunted, for Shane and Shane alone, by the ghosts of erections past, present, and future.

He’s about to open his mouth and tell Ryan some variant of this joke, because he’s an idiot with no game, when instead it transpires that Ryan covers the small space between them _very_ quickly to attach himself to Shane at no fewer than three points of contact.

Ryan’s got him backed up against the wall of the elevator, the wall which is somehow still shockingly cold on his skin. He’s knelt astride Shane’s hips, pressed against him at the crotch and at the chest and at the mouth. The force of the kiss takes Shane by surprise, forces a little _mmph_ out of him.

He winds his arms around Ryan to scratch at Ryan’s sweaty back, to shove his hands in the back pockets of Ryan’s jeans and pull him closer. It’s not artful, but it does the job.

For someone who apparently hadn’t even considered this until roughly ten minutes ago, Ryan’s shockingly game. He’s also shockingly hard in his pants; Shane can feel it against him, hot and urgent and newly surprising with every shift of Ryan’s hips.

“Okay,” Shane says, only pulling away when it’s so good he almost can’t stand it anymore, when he knows if he doesn’t say something now he won’t ever. Ryan’s face is red, his mouth is red and kiss-bruised. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that actually the door _could_ open at any moment, with at least ten people on the other end of it.”

“Don’t care,” Ryan says, trying to chase Shane’s mouth. When he can’t get it, he attaches his lips to Shane’s neck, scrapes at Shane’s jaw with his teeth, starts to suck a mark until Shane dodges.

“You can’t do that, there are—we’re going to get out of this elevator eventually and everybody knows I didn’t come in here with hickeys,” Shane says.

“Don’t _care_.”

“You’re impossible,” Shane says. “Not that I want to discourage this, but: is it worth your job? Because if we get caught, it’s probably our jobs.”

“Call it a calculated risk,” Ryan says, and he unbuttons Shane’s jeans. He’s got the zip down and his hand slid in before Shane can dispute or rationalize, and once Ryan’s hand is on him Shane doesn’t have room in his brain to do either.

Shane’s shocked by the decisiveness of it, the speed with which Ryan has shifted from confused under Shane’s mouth to aggressively going for it. It’s an agility usually reserved for very ancient predators, the creatures that sit frozen in deliberative stillness until they’re sure they’re ready to strike and then burst into movement. Like an alligator or a shark, something that’s barely evolved in eighty million years because it’s already perfect at what it does.

“Oh fuck, you’re a sex crocodile,” Shane whispers when Ryan’s hand starts to move, and Ryan’s mouth curls into an appropriately toothy smile against his own.

“I don’t know what that means. Is that a gay thing, like otter or bear or whatever? Fuck, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ryan confesses, tightening his hand around Shane’s dick, working hard and fast in Shane’s pants. The angle isn’t ideal, the constriction is awkward, but Ryan’s palm is sweaty from the heat or from well-concealed nerves and Shane’s so far gone from the weirdness of the last hour that it doesn’t matter.

“Well you’re doing—uh, oh—great,” Shane mutters around gritted teeth.

“Yeah?” Ryan asks. Shane feels like he’s learned more about Ryan in the last half an hour than he did in the entire first year they worked together.

“You’re so hot like this,” Shane says, just letting his mouth run. “It’s so good, it’s, come on, man, just—faster, please.”

“What, like we’re on a deadline?” Ryan asks lightly, but he complies. He’s so close to Shane, and Shane is _so close_ to coming. He can smell Ryan’s deodorant and his detergent and his skin and all the smells that come together to make him _him,_ all the component parts Shane’s been getting snippets of today blending at last _._

Shane inhales just as Ryan rests his forehead against Shane’s and does something clever and unexpected with his wrist. Then Shane’s coming in his pants without so much as a warning, and Ryan’s pressing his mouth to Shane’s to catch the groan and feed it back to him.

Maybe it’s the altitude, maybe it’s the heat, maybe they really are running out of air in here—but Shane almost blacks out from it, his vision going squiggly at the edges for a full ten seconds like heat waves on hot tarmac.

Ryan pulls his sticky hand out and glances around like he’s trying to figure out what to do with it, what’s safe to wipe his hand on. The problem is that they’re going to need all their clothes, preferably looking as unspoiled as possible, for when those elevator doors open.

Shane leans in, still hazy and endorphin-crushed, and takes Ryan’s fingers in his mouth. He licks them clean, and Ryan’s palm too, while Ryan stares at him in shock.

“Oh Jesus,” he says. “I— _Shane_.”

“If you just give me a minute,” Shane says, de-clouding his head, blinking away the fuzzy vision. When Ryan leans in to kiss him again, he knows Ryan can taste his own sweat and Shane’s come lingering there. Ryan evidently doesn’t mind, because he shudders and presses down against Shane’s leg.

Shane fumbles for Ryan’s fly, pulls his pants and boxer-briefs down around his thighs in one careful yank. He spits into his hand and gets it around Ryan’s dick.

“Better hurry, Ryan,” he whispers. “Those doors could open any minute. Don’t wanna get caught with your pants around your knees, do you? Don’t want everybody to see you like this, with my hand on your cock.”

Ryan lets out a low, strangled moan. His hips snap up into Shane’s hand, apparently unbidden.

“Or maybe you do,” Shane says. “Looks like somebody’s got a touch of an exhibitionist streak. Such a joy, to learn new things about one’s friends.”

Ryan’s whole body is tight against Shane’s, rigid and sweaty and shaking. He fucks like someone who’s holding himself together by the skin of his teeth, like he wants to be pulled apart and is terrified of it at the same time. Shane can work with that.

“He’s so _embarrassed_ when people look at him, but he wants so badly to be looked at,” Shane says to the air. “What a pickle.”

“ _Shane_ —”

“You better tell me when you’re about to come,” Shane goes on, low in Ryan’s ear, biting at his earlobe and the sensitive skin of his neck under his ear. “We don’t want a mess. Everyone will see, they’ll know you couldn’t wait for it.”

“I’m, oh shit, gonna—” Ryan says, laying a warning hand on his wrist. “Shane—”

“At least something in this piece of shit elevator’s going down,” Shane says, a smartass quip he’s been saving up for at least the last five minutes. Then he slides down Ryan’s body to get his mouth around Ryan’s dick. In an ideal world he’d take his time at this, but today it’s urgency borne of necessity. He only has time to get his tongue around the head, for a few quick strokes at the base and a deep slide all the way down, when Ryan’s coming down his throat with a hand firm in his hair.

“Holy fuck,” Ryan whispers a few seconds later, as Shane pulls off with a pop and tucks him back in his pants with a cheery pat. “Warn a guy. Also that was a terrible line, fuck you.”

“How quickly he becomes ungrateful. Dick still wet and everything,” Shane says, wincing at the uncomfortable stickiness in his underwear.

“What did you plan to do about that?” Ryan asks with a lift of an eyebrow.

“Maybe I’ll take them off and send you up the ol’ flagpole with them,” Shane says. “You can hide ‘em on top of the elevator with the hypothetical poop.” He can barely get the words off before he’s laughing into Ryan’s neck, pressing his mouth to Ryan’s Adam’s apple to map it with his tongue and teeth, just like he imagined. A regular Lewis and/or Clark.

“What are you doing?” Ryan asks, shifting against Shane’s mouth but not pulling away.

“I’m claiming this land,” Shane says, tilting his head down to nip at a collarbone and then working a mark in right where the neck of Ryan’s shirt would fall, where Ryan can choose how well to hide it. “It’s my Manifest Destiny. Shanifest Destiny. Manifest Desti-Shane. Aggressive southward expansion is my god-given right and duty.”

“Oh yeah, talk white imperialism to me,” Ryan deadpans, and then he giggles when Shane pokes him in the ribs. “So—oh no!—so hot.”

“I’ll let you decide whether anybody can see that or not,” Shane says, running a finger along the edge of the bruise. “Since you’re into that.”

Ryan’s laughter gets swallowed up in a gasping sort of hiccup. “Jesus, you’re _really_ not a gentleman.”

*

**Phase eight: self-actualization**

They’re both fully clothed again, as presentable as they’re going to get under the circumstances. They might’ve gotten away with the shirtlessness if the elevator didn’t also smell like sex, but Shane figures that they can really only have one or the other.

Ryan’s phone is dead too, now, but it’s got to have been at least an hour and a half that they’ve been stuck in here.

“If this was a romantic comedy this elevator would have sprung to life right after we found fumbling ecstasy in each other’s embrace,” Shane grumbles.

“Fumbling…gross,” Ryan says. He’s half-asleep, shoulder-to-shoulder with Shane. They’re not quite touching, but only because it’s too hot to borrow body heat if there won’t be an orgasm at the end of it.

“Maybe we really will die in here,” Shane says. “Not necessarily where I’d have chosen to go, but I guess there are worse last days on Earth.”

“I told you so. You always accuse me of being histrionic, but sometimes people just…die in elevators.”

Ryan shifts a little, positions himself right in the corner so he can more easily peer over at Shane.

“If we’re going to die, I might as well tell you that I don’t really think we should phase out the Hot Daga. I was just being an ass because you kissed me in an elevator and that was alarming,” he says.

“I knew it! You love it. You’re a Daga-head.”

“Love is a strong word. But I appreciate how much you love it, even if I don’t get it.”

“The story itself isn’t really the point,” Shane says carefully. “I like contributing creatively. I like having a thing that I make for you.”

It’s not quite the whole truth, which he isn’t ready to part with yet, but it’s close enough. He thinks about the long hours spent combing through Ryan’s old voiceover recordings, putting together a character with Ryan’s own voice just for that precious moment of stunned disbelief and dawning realization on Ryan’s face when he heard it.

That investment of time and energy is the strongest commitment Shane knows how to make. Every time he spends hours of his weekend working on that dumb story, he’s saying: _I’m all in on this thing we’re doing, whatever this thing turns out to be_. He thinks, from the way Ryan is grinning over at him, that Ryan knows without him having to say it out loud.

“In that case, I love it,” Ryan says. “I’ll stick it on the fridge. Slap a gold star on it.”

“For the record I still don’t think we’re going to die in here, but just in the interest of full disclosure: when I said I wasn’t going anywhere, I meant that I’m _not going anywhere_. If you’re making a three-year plan for the show, or the network, or—whatever —you can put me in it.”

Ryan just stares at him for a long moment. Shane shifts a little, uncomfortable.

“I want to be in it,” Shane clarifies. He wasn’t planning to get emotionally vulnerable in an elevator when he got up this morning, but then life is full of little surprises.

“Deal,” Ryan says.

“And I would love it if there was, like, sixty percent less spirit box going forward,” Shane adds, pushing his luck, hoping that maybe all the fighting and blushing and coming and sweating will have loosened Ryan up a little.

“No deal,” Ryan says with a frown. “I ride or die for the spirit box.”

It was worth a try.

They start brainstorming ideas for the upcoming season of Supernatural, new things they might try, old bits they might resurrect. Shane pulls his notebook and pen out of his bag to take notes, lets Ryan direct them through weird tangents and far-off hopes and places they’d go if they had the budget. It feels like the beginning, when everything was new and ideas clicked effortlessly into place.

Twenty minutes later, the elevator starts to hum. The lights blink on, and then off, and then they come on again and stay on.

Under the harsh overheads, Shane can see every detail of Ryan’s face. Shane doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it’s a surprise that he looks exactly the same—just rumpled, and sweaty, and rather like he had sex in an elevator.

“Oh shit,” Shane says, feeling the elevator start to move under him, making its way to the second floor at last.

Ryan starts to fuss, plucking at his sweaty shirt, pulling it up over the mark on his chest and then down again, and finally back up to cover it. “How do we—how do I look?”

“You look like you banged it out in an elevator,” Shane says, watching the color rise attractively on Ryan’s cheeks, smiling a lopsided grin when Ryan’s eyes meet his and then dart away again.

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan mutters, putting his notebook away—but Shane knows he likes it, now, knows for a fact that he gets off on the attention. “God, you’re gonna be unbearable now.”

Shane can’t dispute that. He cannot deny that Ryan Bergara’s life is about to get extremely difficult, in a sexy way.

He straightens his own shirt a little, runs hurried fingers through his hair to hide how mussed Ryan’s hands made it. He doesn’t know for sure what will greet them when the door opens, what will be waiting for them outside the elevator, what their life will be like on the other side of this. He’s pretty sure Ryan doesn’t know either.

Ryan’s dragging himself to his feet, stretching his arms and back, and Shane follows suit. They turn as one to face the door, to tackle whatever comes next as a unit.

The elevator door opens with a tiny _ding_.

*


End file.
